[Mark Suszko]

This is how it really went down…

https://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5058529870025933880

[Mark Suszko]

A small addendum, I already discussed this offline with the Doc, but thought other folks consulting this thread in his position could also use the tip, and here it is:

Pretty much every state has it’s own Association of Broadcasters. Sort of an in-state version of NAB. I’ll speak about my own state of Illinois but I figure most of the other states do things the same general way.

The Illinois Broadcasters Association likes to help out charity causes, and sometimes will take a PSA project under their wing and sponsor it’s statewide distribution in extra-good time slots. It is like getting a good statewide paid ad placement in all of the state’s major markets for nothing. Typically I see them done for subjects like highway safety campaigns, medical charities like the Red Cross, maybe for disaster relief. I don’t know their criteria.

I do know they have certain rules for such pro-bono distributions and they include such things as, you can’t be doing any paid placements of the same spot/campaign while the IBA is airing the spots for you for free. That’s obvious when you think about it. They’ll also want a voice tag and a lower third or logo bug super on the spot that identifies the spot as “brought to you by the Illinois Broadcasters Association and this station” or words to that effect. They also do the same thing for radio spots, and if you’re smart, you leveraged or adapted an audio-only version of your spot to play on the radio while the TV campaign is going.

They have limits, they have rules. I don’t know all of them. Go to the source to get all the facts, find your own state’s version of a broadcaster’s association and see if they are able and willing to help you.

The second tip I offer is, most states have a government media department like the one I work in. Sometimes state agencies and constitutional offices find it economical and prudent to piggy-back on an existing PSA campaign that is in line with some program or policy they are advancing. In such a case, the state might chip in the dubbing and distribution of your spot in exchange for adding in some of their own content and etc….. particularly for education, public health or safety or law enforcement campaigns, you should look into finding such synergies with a PSA you make that serves that area of interest.

[Mark Suszko]

We’re looking at this differently in my shop. For Standard Def dubs, we used to ship everything betaSp, one-inch spot reels, and Umatic 3/4 inch, according to station preference… and we still get the odd occasional order for a betaSp dub, but after a phone survey of stations that have always taken our PSA product, we have gone to shipping out DVD-R’s instead. WAY cheaper for postage as well as the media itself, and faster/better/cheaper dubs using DVD duplication machines/printers like the Bravo Primera Pro. BetaSP decks are no longer being made, stations are phasing them out as they become too expensive or difficult to maintain. Dvd blanks are a fraction the cost of Beta tape, the postage is much lower too. And it takes up much less space for blank media as well as the infrastructure. Dubs can be made by unskilled help because there is no analog signal chain to monitor and tweak, we’re just burning the same disk image over and over.

DVD content can be ripped/copied losslessly onto playout servers, or, even if played out of a consumer player, they will not show the same kinds of drop-outs as cantankerous old analog tape gear produces, so you tend to get a cleaner product even thru the analog signal chain. All the way around, DVD has more plusses going for it than betaSp dubs, IMO

But even DVD’s are not the perfect or only answer.

There are an increasing number of FTP services that will let you upload programs and PSA’s directly to the TV stations’ own playout servers, losslessly. You upload it once to the service, all the subscribing stations get it fed to them automatically in a formet they can already use. You get back a readout of who took the feed for tracking purposes, nice to know.

For major market stations, I think this is the wave of the future, already being used in the present. I think our distribution of spots will all be via DVD-R, and an FTP service or BluRay disk for HD, depending what the station prefers. Google up services like Pathfire or TheNEwsmarket for more info.

[Mark Suszko]

Jeremy, I was on the tail end of that era when I got into the biz, and my opinion is it was a bit of both. The barriers to entry were higher, so it was more important to get some internships and a university degreee as a way to get in the door. Nobody was going to let you touch the million-dollar suite until you passed some kind of filter. In my day, a major filter was going thru the university and internship system. It was sort of an apprenticeship.

The guys that ran those 80’s suites broke down into two main types: engineering-centric types who were “helmsmen”, i.e. button-pushers, more interested in the electro-mechanics and not neccessarily storytelling, who took their orders from some creative type, but did pretty boring and blah stuff oin their own… and then there were “cutters” who were already pretty sharp cutting film and just transitioned into a different medium with this then-new technology.

This is not to say there weren’t also blends of these two types, you could find mixtures all along the spectrum, but there was definitely a camp of gearheads who were mostly about the technology, and another camp who were primarily creative storytellers, who really didn’t care how the clock was made, just what time it was. Made for a complete technological ecosystem.

But the shops that pushed the boundaries back then had to have both. Sometimes this was in one person, other times, a team of cutters supported by engineering types. As the gear got ever easier, and the exclusive cachet of the gear wore off the engineering-centric types often moved off to other, more cutting-edge stuff, from my perspective. Kind of like hams after the CB craze. The ones that stayed with it often moved off into more esoteric areas of that hobby.

Again, this is just one man’s generalization, not meant to pigeonhole anybody.

Now, can we get back to how cool this technology is? And how we can start incorporating it into future work.

[Mark Suszko]

Did you follow proper procedure and set up standards first? Bars and tone? Did your editing system flag any part of the signal as out of spec? Are your cameras and systems set up for Japanese black level, or American? Japanese black level is darker at actual zero than American at 7.5 IRE units, so check your waveform and vectorscope displays.

IF the last 2 sentences had totally unfamiliar terms for you in them, we may be on the track of where your problems started.

My guess is though that at the point where you moved your program to DVD, something may not be right. Could you describe in detail the procedures you use and the way the signals flow in your system? From camera thru to final DVD, please. Somebody may pick out the part that creates your trouble.

OTOH, the station could be at fault as well. Particularly with a DVD, you don’t know if they are going to digitally transfer the pristine original quality mpeg files into a server… or play it in analog composite off a $30 Walmart Apex DVd player into a router or patch panel, from there to a betacart or another server… doing who knows how many digital/analog conversions along the way. At any step of that signal chain, something could have been set wrong. Like a game of “telephone”. We may never know what or where.

The best you can do is make sure you have maxed out the quality in your own signal chain to the best of your ability, measured against an actual standard of reference. Those bars and tone need to be actually related to the material that follows them, such that the brigtest white in the bars is the same as the brigtest part of the entire program. The black of the bars needs to match the black level of the program as well, or if the tech adjusts to bars’ black level, but your program is darker, he’s going to over-compensate. If your monitors are not all likewise calibrated, what looks gorgeous on your monitor may be horribly out of spec. If you’ve done that correctly at your end, you can’t be responsible for someone else not calibrating to the bars and tone correctly.

[Mark Suszko]

Charlie, congrats on the career and what I’m sure is a well-deserved rest. Don’t think this gets you off the hook for sticking around here to lend some of your experience to us younger folks!

However, I look at the situation you described differently. I think things are more positive than you’re saying. After all, we are still artists and craftspeople, and the most sophisticated tools in and of themselves don’t create anything. That’s the part of us that never gets old or goes out of style.

I’ve looked all over the Lightwave 3-D interface and damned if I can find the “make cool dinosaur” button:-) Likewise, Final Cut does not have a “make this video not suck” menu. Such things are up to we who want to learn how to do these things.

The link I pointed out offers a powerful new combination of tools, nothing more. They can be used to fix things that never could be fixed before, and they can be used proactively to improve or create new, better images we could only imagine before. It’s all really up to us. And it is this facet of many in the business that keeps me feeling young. You can’t learn it all, it keeps growing, and you chase it as long as as hard as you dare. I’m just now getting to the point in my own life that I’m beginning to see what all the possibilities are, how the new parts can be fit together with the old, so we can do what we have always done, since Porter spliced his first shot:

Tell stories.

[Mark Suszko]

Myself, I’m generally more of a tell-me-the-time,-not-how-to-build-the-watch kind of guy. I know a little about a lot of things, and baby, I can guess the rest…

The artist is not his tools: he KNOWS his tools, but he doesn’t necessarily always need to BUILD his tools.

In the Renaissance days, painters had to grind their own pigments and mix up their own paints, but once the technology to pre-mix a consistent pigment and binder and package it in a tube came along, most painters made better use of their time actually, you know, *painting*.

To take the analogy into other disciplines, Dale Jr. is a great driver, and knows more about race cars than you or I, but I bet his chief mechanic and pit crew know even more. Junior needs to know enough to drive, and to understand the limits of his machine, how to interpret and communicate it’s behavior to his crew, so they can tweak and adjust to his standards.

Jimmy Hendrix didn’t need to be a luthier, and I’m skeptical such knowledge would have added that much more to his artistic genius.

Orville and Wilber knew how to build their plane, but the guy in the cockpit of your United 777 likely doesn’t know how to buck rivets and apply clecos, but he knows how to take the built machine and fly it halfway around the world thru storms and dark and land it where you want to be, on time.

Yes, mastering the tools to the point you can build and maintain them can lead to your art and skills as an artist being even greater. But it is more of an option than a requirement for greatness, IMO, a choice the individual makes.

In terms of pure economy and practicality, I’m sure most producers and company bosses would prefer that you spend the bulk of your time actually editing, and not running around with the soldering iron or debugging code. Someone else has chosen to become a virtuoso at that skill set, and I say, let him do it, he’s better than I as a generalist can ever be. There are editor/ effects specialists that write their own plug-ins, creating new efects we’ve never seen before; they are kind of elites in my book, and I applaud them. But I don’t feel the need to learn C++ or whatever to get my work done, I’m not working on that rarefied level. I wait until I can buy their plug-ins and use them for my own needs as appropriate.

I want to know enough about the system to be like Dale Junior and his car: To wring the best performance out of it as-is, and to be able to communicate needs and ask questions of my crew chief/ chief engineer/ VAR when it’s broken or when I want it to do something that it’s never done before. But don’t ask me the differences between BIOS settings or what card goes best with what do-dad, particularly when they change from month to month. I have enoguh problems getting the program finished by deadline!

I don’t like making, labeling, and mailing out dubs, for instance, partly because I burned out a long time ago on them as a summer job in my youth, but also because once the system is set up, my MOM could make dubs… I have over twenty years of experience and training in doing higher-level production and editing functions, I am getting paid to execute higher-level functions, and I don’t think it’s exactly snobbery or acting over-entitled to disdain dub work; just bad economics to make me do it if a an idle, unskilled person is available to take that load, and let me get back to creative work that only I can do.

I’m not being egocentric about this or lazy; I mean, I’ll take one for the team, pull my weight, and MAKE the $%#%$ dubs if I have to, there’s nothing about the work that is lowly or shameful, but I feel the same way about it a surgeon might feel if asked to clean bedpans. I am not ashamed or insulted to do it, if it needs doing. But it’s not the best match of talents to tasks, and in the greater interest of the organization, I should be doing something more complicated.

I get a lot of time to compose a speech like that while making the $%#^$% dubs:-)

Did I mention I hate dubs?

[Mark Suszko]

Sound Soap works for a few folks. I am not a full-blown audio guru, but I would look at playing with downward expansion and use of compression to try and minimize the most distorted frequency bands.
You may need to play with multiple, stacked copies of the tracks to get the best out of each of the highs, mids, and lows.

[Mark Suszko]

This is purely suppositional, but if I was in ProMax’s position, knowing that people would be a little skittish early in the comeback period, I would go out of my way to be ridiculously helpful in customer support, seeing it as the best marketing investment you can make. Charles’ old ProMax built it’s business on such a sterling reputation and word of mouth. So to make the rebooted version of the company a long-term success, you HAVE to work your butt off to meet and exceed the previous reputation. Meaning the early pioneer customers should, in theory at least, get the absolute BEST service.

[Mark Suszko]

Ok, some may find these too obvious, but I find them very well-produced and good refreshers for those that already know about the subject. Go to the web site for Digital Juice, the jump-backs people, and locate and click the tab for their “DJTV” section. There are a host of very well-produced tutorials on a variety of subjects including lighting and shot composition, editing tips and tricks, and technical background, interspersed with sale pitches for their various products. There’s also a series on the philosophy of *how* we work that is well done, and should spark some meaningful discussions in your office. Go thru their entire online back-catalog of these videos. Then look for and buy a DVD of their last 2 season’s worth of the previous ones, which have some of Perry’s setups and demos, which are no longer online, and you will quickly see some improvement in the level of your work and in how you approach it.